I'm sorry for terrible text: i've hand written it on paper and scanned, and my hand-writing is even worse than collage making. Snow decorations created with my snowflake brushes for Adobe Photoshop. Hope that i'll create something better for next Christmas!

I hardly imagine how much time and effort it takes to create this ultra high resolution poster by Don Komarechka!

Canadian professional photographer Don Komarechka (Website, Google+, Facebook, Flickr) individually captured and processed all those 400+ snow crystals using focus stacking technique. Sometimes i use focus stacking, too, and i can say that this technique requires patience, accuracy and lots of time and effort.

Interesting fact: all snowflakes you see here presented in their real scale, relative to each other. This was not easy to achieve, said Don. For each snowflake in this poster Don carefully adjusts lighting and shoots lots of source photos with different focus, required for later processing.

Good light means a lot in snowflake macro photography, especially for snow crystals that shows wonderful rainbow-like thin film optical interference effect. This effect can be seen only on snowflakes, which contains air cavities in their body, and interleaved layers of ice and air very thin. And even if snowflake can produce these colors, they need proper light to be seen. Don Komarechka a real magician, who able to make these snowflakes to show the best they can offer:

Don captures and processes wide range of snow crystals, showing their huge diversity: from tiny and very unusual snowflake types...

I'm big fan of Don Komarechka's snowflake photography, and always wait for his new Snowflake-a-Day project. During whole winter, Don processes and posts one snowflake photo each day, including weekends and holidays. Because processing of every single photo requires several hours of careful and accurate work, this project is really hard task!

This winter, Don already started his project. On very first photo from this winter, you see rare and complex snowflake formation: two rosettes of bullet crystals with branched caps:

Also, i recommend to see another excellent work by Don Komarechka - illustrated hardcover book about his way of snowflake photography, physics of ice crystals formation and many other interesting topics:

(photographs in this post and the book cover (c) Don Komarechka, posted using embed codes from his Flickr photostream)

This is very big snowflake, approximately 8 millimeters from tip to tip. It is bigger than these two large snowflakes of same type: Silverware / Neon and Cloud number nine:

This is fernlike dendrite snow crystal. This type can be seen often, and usually these crystals bigger than snowflakes of other types. I have seen crystals slightly bigger than 1 centimeter from tip to tip! These snowflakes can be seen by naked eye in full details, especially on contrast dark backdrop. These snowflakes reminds stellar dendrites, but have more complex and "random" structure: they have more "side branches" and "leaves", and they grows with not too strict symmetry.

Also, these crystals are fragile: their branches are big, but central hexagon is small, compared to other snow crystals. Often they can be seen with lost arms, and it seems that they can broke in air, before they fall, when they grow big enough.

If you ever seen one fernlike dendrite crystal, you have seen them all: their "general design" is the same for every snowflake of this type, though they are all different in details.

8 identical shots was averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio of this image. Crystal captured on glass surface with LED back light, using Canon Powershot A650is with additional lens Helios 44M-5, in January 2013, Moscow.

This milestone means a lot for me. All blog pages and posts (including that article) reached only 1.5 million views by now. Currently, i work on third major update of snowflake article (russian update already done, translation to English in progress). In a few days, article will be bigger, more accurate, and, i hope, my terrible English will be slightly more readable, thanks to Google translate (it helps me often).

From ten thousand feet above the Earth, a snowflake begins its fall. Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weighs next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall--finally landing where Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht can use microphotography to record the tiny, intricate, frozen artistry of the snowflake.

«In a snowflake, just an ordinary snowflake, we can find a fascinating tale of the spontaneous emergence of pattern and form. From shapeless water vapor, complex structures emerge in an airborne symphony of meteorological morphogenesis. Snowflakes are the product of a rich synthesis of physics, mathematics, and chemistry -- and they're fun to catch on your tongue.»

Besides of very interesting content, i was impressed by quality of snowflake photos in the book. Kenneth Libbrecht's snowflake photography is real inspiration for me.

In new revision of the book (2015), authors also introduced other snowflake photographers (including my mom and myself) with examples of their work, showing different approaches to snow crystal macro photography. We both very proud of it!

For this collage i used special variants of four snowflake photos. When processing each snowflake, i draw by hand precise mask, which separates crystal from background (i need it for processing object and background with different sharpening and noise removing settings). Drawing these mask is time consuming work, and requires lots of patience; but automatic methods of edge selection, which i've tried, do not provide enough quality. Now masks was used to blur background around snowflakes.

I'm not sure that these variants are good, though, because original background is visible through transparent crystals. You can see original snowflake photos: Rigel, Leaves of ice, Alioth and Vega on unchanged background.

Dark grey woolen fabric looks quite strange on high magnification, and i cannot say that wool fibers looks beautiful. On the other hand, these thin and rigid fibers are works really well for shooting process: they effectively trap snowflake and prevent wind to blow it away; also, snowflake usually hangs in the air above wool fabric, touching fibers only at few points. This slows down melting, which is very important in warm days, when temperature is too close to freezing point.

You can see visual difference in size of crystals in this collage, and it is real: all four snowflakes was captured at same distance from the lens and with fixed magnification, and i do not re-scaled photos on post-processing stage.

Just load unpacked file snowflake_brushes1.abr from brush panel, and they will append to list of current brushes. In case if this file is not compatible with some Photoshop versions, it can be easily re-created from files in folder PNG\ with Photoshop command Edit -> Define brush preset.

I borrowed this specimen from school's biology class. This is tropical butterfly Caligo oileus (Brown Owl butterfly, or Oileus Giant Owl). This fragment is the part of white rim around big "eye" at rear side of the wings.

I've tried nice program PhotoSketcher and really like it! It is free, have lots of painting modes and settings, and produces very interesting results. I definitely will use it more.

From this HDR photo i created in PhotoSketcher 5 variants with different level of details (different number of passes and minimal brush size). Then, i combined them in Photoshop with masks, and applied canvas texture from this great set: free canvas textures.

This is one of my favorite snowflake photos. I processed this crystal in 2013, but then i made a mistake and was not saved uncropped version. This prevents me to make wallpaper version, until i re-processed that photo.

This is fragment of old photo, slightly postprocessed. I created a mask for stars (using levels on monochrome copy of picture) and added some glow to stars with it.

Stars photography in cities like Moscow, with strong light pollution, really painful task. For this picture, i aligned and averaged stack of 10 long exposure shots (15 seconds each), taken on very edge of the city at clean and starry night.

I came across wonderful online vectorizing service: vectormagic.com and very impressed by results it creates. These vector images reminds me great old video game Another World. Of course, automatic raster-to-vector transformation simplifies snowflake structure and reduces number of colors, but still, it looks really nice, at my taste.

Stamen of vegetable marrow with pollen grains. These grains are slightly smaller than pollen of common hollyhock, and have similar shape (sphere with small spikes), but on these grains we can see also bigger spikes. For comparison, here you'll find an electronic microscopy image of marrow pollen grain:

This is macro photo of single stamen inside a flower field scabious, or Knautia Arvensis with grains of pollen. This plant is common around Moscow and in the parks of the city (we call these flowers "короставник"). Stamens of this flower produce so small pollen grains that they are beyond capabilities of my current optics: on this picture, we cannot see exact shape of grains. But pink color of pollen is real, it is not cast by flower petals, which you see at background: when i transferred this pollen at black glass, grains still looks pink on camera screen.

For this image, i've used my trusty "snowflake" macro setup (i described it in article about snowflake macro photography). Daylight comes from left side, and reflected from right side with aluminium foil.

I used focus stacking and averaging techniques: 12 groups of photos with different focus was taken, each group contained 10 identical shots for averaging. After assembling object, i've prepared background (averaged all 120 source RAW photos - for better smoothness of color gradients with no visible traces of noise) and combined object and background with manually painted mask.